general question concerning copying files

Hello everyone!
I am very new to the whole computer science field in general so please go easy on me.

So I was given an assignment that is given as project2.tar which inside has a Makefile, a .c file, a .o file, test cases, a bunch of stuff. I currently use a mac. When I open up a one of these files, it has just a bunch of symbols and no actual code which I'm pretty sure it's supposed to have some code. Therefore I could not manually just copy these files to my virtual machine through the shell terminal.
I have previously used windows computers so I tried it on one of my old computers where I could use WinSCP but it would open it up through winrar which just seemed to messed things up. I then tried it on a different computer to open it up without winrar, succeeded in taking the tar file over to my virtual machine using WinSCP but I couldn't access any of the files inside the tar file.
So essentially I'm very confused and have tried a lot of things haha!
If you guys could help me outline these basics, it would be much appreciated!
Thank you in advance!